Venice Film Festival features CARLOS director Olivier Assayas

There’s been plenty of buzz about the biggest movies to emerge from the Venice Film Festival thus far — if you haven’t heard of them yet, you will soon enough. There’s Terrence Malick’s typically abstruse TO THE WONDER; Spike Lee’s Michael Jackson tribute BAD 25; Paul Thomas Anderson’s Scientology-inspired THE MASTER; and our own Robert Redford’s THE COMPANY YOU KEEP.

But of course one of the joys of festival season is the discovery of smaller films that demand the attention of audiences (and critics). Such is certainly the case for SOMETHING IN THE AIR, writer-director Olivier Assayas’ semiautobiographical account of political foment in the early-’70s Paris of his youth. “It was a difficult period,” Assayas told The Hollywood Reporter. “There was… a kind of cultural distrust that was addressed through experimental film, documentaries and fiction.”